Field of the Invention
The invention relates to a household appliance with a panel that is disposed on the front of the appliance and optionally has control and display elements, the panel has a panel body that receives the control and display elements and striplike laminations mounted along a lower peripheral zone of the panel body.
When household appliances are inserted into a row of kitchen cabinets, it is desirable that the appliances be adapted largely to the adjacent kitchen cabinets in terms of their appearance from the front. To that end, the appliances are lined with plates that correspond in material and appearance to the doors of the kitchen cabinets. A uniform line along the top front of the cabinets, where often a drawer is disposed above a door, is also considered important. Since the panel bodies or drawer front each have different dimensions, depending on the appliance or cabinet manufacturer, the aforementioned laminations are used to compensate for the differences.
To that end, German Patent DE 30 15 251 has proposed a boxlike panel that receives the control and display elements of the household appliance. Its panel body is provided on its underside with striplike laminations extending along the entire width of the panel body. In order to compensate for any difference between the panel body and a furniture panel located below it, the laminations are joined into a unit that produces the appropriate height, and that unit is in turn joined to the panel body. In order to join the individual laminations to one another and to the panel body, the laminations are penetrated by screws on both sides that are screwed into a thread of the panel body. The laminations are all constructed identically, and on their broad sides which do not act as a panel surface, they have grooves and lands, which are joined movably together in a kind of tongue and groove connection. A uniform spacing between the individual laminations is accomplished through the use of compression springs inserted into the interstices among the individual laminations disposed one above the other. The use of screws requires the making of a thread in the panel body and is complicated and expensive. The above-described configuration has the further disadvantage of permitting the screw to be unscrewed far enough that the laminations no longer coincide, and if the screw is unscrewed completely the lamination packet falls apart.